Forms: 5 smoge, 6 smoudge, 7 smodge, smooge, 6–7, 9 smudge. [Of obscure origin; cf. the later SMUTCH v.]
1. trans. To soil, stain, blacken, smirch; to mark with dirty stains or smears.
c. 1430. Freemasonry (1860), 744. Kepe thyn hondes, fayr and wel, From fowle smogynge of thy towel.
1548. Elyot, Atratus, blacked or smudged [1565 Cooper smoudged].
1604. T. M., Black Bk., D j b. The Sheetes smudged so durtily.
1609. Heywood, Brit. Troy, V. Epil. The God whose face is Smoog’d with smoke and fiar. Ibid. (1637), Pleas. Dial., iv. Wks. 1874, VI. 157. To be smudg’d and grim’d with soot.
1828. Carr, Craven Gloss., Smudged, begrimed.
1841. J. T. Hewlett, Parish Clerk, II. 195. He … put on a Guy-Fawkes-looking thing, worn nearly threadbare, and smudged for several inches up the sleeve of the left arm with the wipings of his pens.
1887. Dowden, Shelley, I. i. 30. With face and hands smudged and stained by explosive powders and virulent acids.
fig. 1602. How to choose a Good Wife, V. ii. The beauty of the mind, Which neither time can alter … nor the black hand of envy Smudge and disgrace.
1896. Boston (Mass.) Jrnl., 29 Feb., 5/1. Halifax Chronicle smudged [= charged with libel].
b. To rub out or in, to paint or lay on, etc., in a smearing or daubing manner.
1864. Slang Dict., 237. Smudge, to smear, obliterate.
1878. [G. N. Banks], About some Fellows, 26. [He] made a considerably worse mess trying to smudge it out.
1899. J. G. Millais, Sir J. E. Millais, II. xvii. 213. The critics insisting … that it was a stuffed bird, just smudged into the picture.
1901. J. Black’s Carp. & Build., 42. Everybody, even the youngest boy, imagines he can ‘smudge’ paint.
c. absol. To make or leave a stain.
1902. Longman’s Mag., May, 4. The soil here, coloured by old Devon Sandstone, smudges red, not brown.
2. To bungle, make a mess of (something).
1864. Whyte-Melville, Brookes of Bridlemere, xviii. He smudged it awfully, but we got over without a fall!
Hence Smudging ppl. a.
a. 1861. Mrs. Browning, Par. Theocritus, Poet. Wks. (1904), 584. One shaggy eyebrow draws its smudging road Straight through my ample front, from ear to ear.
